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Guitar & Bass Mods

DIY: Easy 4-Step Guitar Setup Guide
DIY: Easy 4-Step Guitar Setup - Adjusting Neck, Setting String Action, Filing Nut Slots & Intonation

Nashville luthier and repair tech Dave Johnson from Scale Model Guitars leads you through a simple process to improve your guitar's playability by showing the steps to execute a neck adjustment, dial in your string action at the bridge, improve your nut slots, and lock down stable intonation.

Steve Albini in the control room at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Photo by Kevin Tiongson

Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.

“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”

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Luthier Dave Helmer shows you how to cure buzzy strings, bad intonation, gnarly frets, high action, and other common troubles with off-the-shelf axes.

Guitars are the best. We love them. It’s fun to fall in love with a guitar at a store, buy it, and proudly bring it home. But we’ve all been there … where after a month that new guitar is just not playing as good as it was before. As guitar players, we know what feels good and what feels bad when it comes to playability. Maybe you have setup preferences that you like on all your guitars, or maybe you want to experiment with changes to your setup?

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This diagram clearly illustrates Dirk Wacker's wiring mod for this month.

Photo courtesy of SINGLECOIL (singlecoil.com)

If you want the maximum tones out of an HSS-configured guitar, here’s how to wire the switching and eliminate two pet peeves from a basic auto-split wiring.

Welcome back to Mod Garage. This month we’ll have a deeper look into auto-splitting pickups on an HSS-configured Strat and similar guitars. We covered this a long time ago, exploring the basic version of this wiring in “Stratocaster Auto-Split Mod.” Today we’ll take it one step further with a pro version and discuss what can be done with it.

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Straight from the builder’s bench: Here are some tools that might just make your life a little easier.

Straight from the builder’s bench—these are the cool tools you need to keep your workflow moving along smoothly.

Guitar gear, by nature, regularly requires a bit of maintenance. So whether you’re a guitarist, builder, or both, having good tools makes it easier to stay on top of seasonal or technical changes. Any endeavor that requires mechanical or electrical maintenance is subject to what I call the 80/20 rule. This axiom refers to how we can spend 80 percent of our time fixing and 20 percent enjoying the fruits of our labor. You probably have a screwdriver or some wrenches, but there are a few neat little bits that make life on the workbench more pleasant and maybe shift the percentages of that rule.

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